It only remained to
discover what those general laws were. He consulted the Old
Testament, and could doubt no longer. He would apply to his
scholars, as he himself explained to them in one of his sermons,
'the principle which seemed to him to have been adopted in the
training of the childhood of the human race itself'. He would
treat the boys at Rugby as Jehovah had treated the Chosen People:
he would found a theocracy; and there should be judges in Israel.
For this purpose, the system, prevalent in most of the public
schools of the day, by which the elder boys were deputed to keep
order in the class-rooms, lay ready to Dr. Arnold's hand. He
found the Praepostor a mere disciplinary convenience, and he
converted him into an organ of government. Every boy in the Sixth
Form became ipso facto a Praepostor, with powers extending over
every department of school life; and the Sixth Form as a body was
erected into an authority responsible to the headmaster, and to
the headmaster alone, for the internal management of the school.
This was the means by which Dr. Arnold hoped to turn Rugby into
'a place of really Christian education'. The boys were to work
out their own salvation, like the human race. He himself,
involved in awful grandeur, ruled remotely, through his chosen
instruments, from an inaccessible heaven.
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